[MiNT] mintbin

["Guido Flohr" <gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de>]

Hi,

I almost forgot: I've uploaded the new version of mintbin to

  ftp://ftp.uni-giessen.de/pub/atari/mint/programming/mintbin-0.3.tar.gz

You will also find a binary distribution (packaged by Frank, thanks!)
there.

New version? Was there an old one? Not really ...

Frank and I are already working for quite a while with new binutils for
MiNT, namely the GNU binutils 2.9.1.  That means that there will be a
state-of-the-art linker, archiver, symbol-lister (nm), assembler, strip,
... available for MiNT.

Porting the binutils required two major changes: The program format has
changed and the format of libraries has slightly changed.  The new program
format is compatible with the old format, the new executables will even
run under TOS 1.04 (I've tested that).

A little drawback of that change is that the old tools printstk and fixstk
(as well as cnm and size68) will not work on the new program format.  I've
written replacements for all these programs and this is what mintbin is
for. The new tools will auto-detect the format of the binaries and so you
can use them as a full replacement.  This is also important for
non-programmers, I recommend to update from
printstk/fixstk/toglclr/prgflags to mintbin.

Another feature (or non-feature for some people): The package is fully
internationalized, although currently there is only a German version
available, see the file ABOUT-NLS and README included in the package for
details.  If anybody cares to translate the messages into her/his native
language, please contact me.  Somebody already volunteered to do that for
his language but that was so long ago that I don't dare to ask that
someone again now. ;-)

There is still a lot of documentation missing but all tools are pretty
self-explanatory and they all have a standard GNU interface (--help,
--version, ...).  The documentation on the new binary formats is quite
exhaustive yet.

If you are interested in building the GNU binutils yourself, please
contact me. I will send you a set of patches.  You will need the sources
of the GNU binutils 2.9.1 (exactly that version or you need developer
versions of autoconf, automake and libtool), a lot of disk space (20 MB I
would guess) and a lot of time.

There will be an easy installable binary distribution of all programs
soon, but some details still need to be worked out.  I merely release
mintbin now because there are already a few programs in the new format
floating around and everybody should be able to fix the stack size of
these programs in case of an overflow.

Thanks for your attention.

Guido

P.S.: I forgot to mention, don't worry about the new lib format, mintbin
contains a converter so that you don't have to recompile your old libs.
You can safely convert them to the new format in case you already want to 
use the new binutils.

P.P.S.: The new lib format is not a proprietary MiNT format, the old one
was!  The new format is the standard GNU ar which differs slightly from
the one we currently use. 
-- 
http://stud.uni-sb.de/~gufl0000
mailto:gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de